


Along Tides of Light

by NoisyNoiverns, xMidnightSun



Series: Rise & Reign [3]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-12-13
Packaged: 2018-02-25 06:43:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2612123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoisyNoiverns/pseuds/NoisyNoiverns, https://archiveofourown.org/users/xMidnightSun/pseuds/xMidnightSun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A lucky find gives Siri'Yanna the chance to change everything for her race. Getting to it is the easy part. Getting out alive, however, is a bit more complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Won't Anyone Think of the Gas Prices?

"You're sure it's geth?"

Siri nodded, pacing anxiously alongside the holographic display. Normally a scaled model of the galaxy, the projector now displayed a small moon in the furthest reaches of the galaxy, distant from even the furthest colonies yet close enough that seeing its name gave everyone pause. "Positive. The transmissions I intercepted were triple-encrypted and used geth protocols. I checked it against an archive. Probably a backup that bounced off the wrong relay."

"Seems awful convenient," Kel muttered, tapping a few buttons on his omni-tool to bring up the transmissions in question. "I mean, what are the chances the geth are going to bounce a backup wrong and have it end up at the Citadel from all the way across the galaxy? They're networked synthetics, you'd think they'd have doing it right down to a science."

Thie nodded. "Could it be fabricated?"

"No, I checked." Siri shook her head viciously and frantically tapped at her omni-tool until another display appeared beside the one projecting from Kel's. "See? These are archived geth transmissions from a Pilgrimage a few years back. See how the encryption matches? And the coding? And it was in the same channels, keyed for low-frequency to avoid detection."

"Then how did the transmission end up on the Citadel?" Axilus asked from the cockpit, mandibles fluttering in contemplation. "You have to admit, it's pretty strange."

After a pause, Siri lifted her shoulders in a half-hearted shrug. "I don't know," she admitted. "The best I can figure is that there was a geth patrol just out of range for detection. They might have been transmitting observations back to the outpost on Thaubos, or scans. Maybe they were planning an invasion or something, or maybe they're just scouting. I don't know."

"But what would the geth be doing out by the Citadel? I mean, honestly." Thie shook his head. "They haven't been seen outside the Veil for almost 200 years. Why would they start showing up now?"

"Like I said, maybe they're scouting or planning an invasion. All I can do is speculate. I'm not a geth, why are you asking me?"

"Because you're the one who found it," Axilus muttered, wincing when the back of his seat popped with an Overload. "Hey, hitting the pilot with tech attacks while he's trying to fly is considered a pretty universally bad idea, you know!"

Siri huffed petulantly and cleared the encryption data from the display. "I just think we should go check it out. I mean, if there are geth outside of geth space, that might be something the Fleet should know, don't you think?"

Thie quietly considered, then nodded. "It couldn't hurt. At worst, we land on an uninhabited planet, scuff around for a shift or two, then go home empty-handed."

"Yeah, and waste a shit-fuckton of fuel along the way." Axilus snorted and shook his head hard enough to clack his mandibles against his jaw. "I'd thought you quarians would have come to appreciate galactic gas prices more than this. We're poor, or did you forget that? We can't exactly afford to go checking out all the stupid shit that exists just because there _might_ be something. Shouldn't we get concrete evidence _before_ we throw our credits down the drain? Just saying."

"Stop being an ass just because you didn't find the signal first, Axilus."

"I'm not being an ass, I'm stating facts! Spirits!" Axilus groaned and sat back, pressing his hands into the spaces between his plates which housed his eyes. "Does no one appreciate fuel prices except for the pilot anymore?"

"I dunno, I'm kind of with the turian on this one," Kel murmured, shrugging apologetically at Siri when she gave him a positively lethal glare. "I mean, I trust you and all, but we don't even know if this signal is legit. Maybe it _is_ a false alarm. Maybe some kid from the Wards thought it would be funny to give every quarian in range a heart attack for no good reason. I mean, if you just think about it, it's really strange. Suspicious."

"Like I said, if it _is_ legitimate, we'll have something important to forward to the Fleet. A real geth outpost should have a server or main hub for the geth to connect to, something we can access and get data from before it self-deletes. Who knows, maybe we'll even be able to send back some geth components for study." Thie crossed his arms behind his back. "If the signal's fake, yes, we wasted fuel, but at least we'll know for sure, and we'll be able to avoid it next time."

"Well, when you put it like that..."

Axilus groaned loudly and slammed his face into the forward console. "You've got to be shitting me."

Thie shook his head and moved up to his regular station at Axilus's elbow. "Enter the coordinates, Madelivio. You don't have to come down with us if you don't want to, you can stay in the ship and pout."

"Turians don't pout."

"Au contraire, my dear Madelivio."

"Are you insulting me? Because I don't understand that reference so I'm not sure whether or not I should punch you in the throat for it."

Thie rolled his eyes. "Just input the coordinates." As Axilus reluctantly complied, grumbling the whole time, he shifted his weight to his good leg (the other, while it wasn't broken anymore, still throbbed painfully anytime he put too much weight on it for too long) and asked, "How long will the trip take?"

Axilus huffed, keying in the last few numbers. "Just under four hours if we hit the relays right."

"You mean if there's no traffic."

"Right. It's a long trip with..." He paused, counted, then finished, "Eight jumps, total. If there's stops in between, we could be looking at anywhere from six to a full day. So just hope the Fleet isn't passing through one of the relays we need, hey?"

Thie grimaced. Normally relay trips were quick and easy, but he had a point. If the Fleet was passing through one of the systems they needed, they could be set back by up to two days, maybe more. More than enough time for the geth outpost to vanish into thin air. Better just hope whatever ancestor had been granting him bad luck had stayed on Palaven. "And once we're through the relay system?"

Axilus shrugged. "It looks like a pretty distant system, so maybe... five, six hours of FTL." He paused, then grumbled, "If we don't run out of gas."

Thie cuffed him lightly in the side of the head, internally wincing when his hand immediately reminded him that turian plates were indeed quite hard and that was a really fucking bad idea, you fucking moron, what were you thinking? "Quit your bitching, Ax. If we run out of gas, we run out of gas and you can blame me. If not, you have nothing to be bitching about, so stop bitching. Just focus on getting us there."

The turian grumbled, whipping his head back and forth as if Thie's blow had actually done some damage that needed to be shaken off, then dropped his mandibles in a very clear pout. "Whatever. Be about half an hour to the relay. Do something useful and suck my dick or somethin'- I mean what."

"Nice save." Thie rolled his eyes and mumbled something derogatory about turian teenagers under his breath, turning to make his way back to the galaxy map, which had returned to being a galaxy map, and the quarians still awkwardly hovering around it. "Let me know when you're about to jump."

"Can do, Cap'n." Axilus bared his teeth in a very strange human-like grin, which looked absolutely terrifying on anything and everything with mandibles. "Tell the kids to keep the PDA to a minimum for me."

"Kel's older than you," he called back, and Axilus scoffed and replied, "By three Palavenian months!" Thie just shook his head in response and kept walking.

Siri looked up once he was within acceptable distance, wringing her hands. "Are we going to-?"

"Ten-plus hour ride, half an hour to first jump," Thie interrupted with a short nod. "Might be a while before anything of note happens. Make yourselves cozy. I'll be down in the CO's quarters if you need me."

"So we're going?" Kel sounded surprised. "Even though we're not sure it's even real?"

"We're going, and if that's a problem you can stay on the ship and sulk with Axilus." Thie shook his head and headed for the stairs, only to find his path blocked by the very large, very wall-like mass of brown plates and scars going by the name of Raik Gemeng. "Can I help you?"

Raik casually crossed his arms. "So I heard we're heading into the fringes of geth space."

Thie sighed. Oh boy. "Yes, actually. We're heading to the moon of Thaubos in the Shonas Beta cluster. Siri thinks she's tracked down a geth outpost, and we're going to check it out. If it's legitimate, we're going to grab what we can and run. If not, well, we know what we're looking for next time we're trying to sift through the fakes. Like I told Axilus and Kel, you don't like it, you can stay on the ship. You don't have to come-"

"You kidding me?"

That was unexpected. Thie paused and blinked. "What?"

Raik grinned. "You're not going anywhere without me, Tiny. If you're leaving the ship, I'm comin' along to make sure you don't kill yourself."

"I..." He blinked slowly. "Uh... okay. Right. Well, if you want to come along, feel free."

"Good, cuz I wasn't gonna ask permission."

"... right. Uh. Can I get through?"

"What, don't wanna work on your shotgun with the rest of us? You compensating for something, Tiny?" The edges of his mouth twisted up into a grin, and Thie's blood ran cold. Oh no. This could only end badly. "Or are you doin' something you shouldn't be? Like... installing mods of questionable function on your suit?" If a krogan could waggle his eyebrows, Raik was doing it. "Anything our turian friend up front can do to help?"

Thie felt his cheeks flush and dimmed his visor so the krogan couldn't see. "I... you know what, fuck you. Give me my gun before I..." Oh. Wait. He didn't have his biotics handy anymore. Shit. "Just give me my goddamn shotgun, you _shen'kiira bosh'tet_."

Raik just grinned and pushed the shotgun into his hands as he passed, casually leaning against Axilus's seat in the cockpit to watch Thie stomp down the stairs and out of sight. After the amusement of having successfully flustered the incredibly-flusterable quarian yet again had passed, he turned back to raise an eye ridge at Axilus, rumbling, "So. Geth. Sounds fun, huh, Mads?"

Axilus slammed his forehead into the forward console again with a growl."Don't. Even. Start."

* * *

"See? _See?"_ Siri trumphantly gestured towards the projection of the base which had taken over the galaxy map projector, grin evident even through her mask. "I _told_ you there was a geth outpost! I _knew_ it was legitimate!"

Axilus rolled his eyes. "Siri, scans say it's an old STG base. Not geth."

"But look at the geth signatures! They're right there on the moon, and there's got to be at least fifteen units down there, maybe more!"

Thie stared at the data scanning across his omni-tool, whistling under his breath. "She's right. Active geth signatures, enough for fifteen to twenty units. Looks like they've got a server or something in the middle of the complex. It's nothing big, but it's still something. Proof the geth have left the Veil."

"How did they set up a recon base without anyone noticing?" Kel's eyes were wide as moons beneath his mask. "I mean- how didn't we notice? How didn't the turians?"

"Nobody thought they were a threat except us." Thie shut down the data stream and glanced up. "Since they haven't left the Veil in so long, everyone thought they just wouldn't. You can do a lot when nobody's looking at or for you. The real question is, what are they doing with this base? And why?"

"Obviously they're doing surveillance, recon, something of that nature. Why else would they have been around the Citadel?"

"We don't even know that they _were_ around the Citadel. It's entirely possible that their communications just hit a wrong comm buoy."

"Or they were doing recon around the Citadel in preparation for an assault!"

Thie rolled his eyes. "Break it up, you two. We don't have enough information to make assumptions either way. So quit bitching and we'll sort it out after we hit the server. There's bound to be something there that'll give us a clue. Maybe tactical data, or something the Fleet can reconstruct and decode."

"Right, sorry." Siri shook her head, hovering close to the display. "It looks like there's a clearing about a hundred meters that way. Should be just out of range for them. Axilus can drop us there and we can make our way in on foot. If we're quiet, they might not notice us until it's too late."

"Good plan. Only problem is, what if they have proximity alarms?" Thie crossed his arms. "I mean, I don't know if you've noticed, but none of us is equipped to take down a small army of fully-armed geth units. We don't have the weapons or the experience. If they notice us, we're fucked."

"What if we jam their sensors?" Kel suggested.

Thie just shook his head. "That would just tip them off that someone's attacking, put them on guard. And a small army of _prepared_ fully-armed geth units is the absolute _last_ thing we need."

"What about individual disruptors? Nothing big enough to set off alarms, but small enough to keep us off the sensors."

"No good. Geth are synthetic, they don't have the organic margin of error. They'll notice whatever discrepency you throw at them, no matter how small."

"Well, fuck." Kel sighed and shook his head. "Any way we can rig up an EMP pulse, knock them out? No?"

"That would erase the server, Kel. Even if we had the supplies, we wouldn't be doing that."

"How about a krogan air-drop?" came Raik's suggestion from across the room, and Axilus snorted.

"How are a group of quarians going to perform a krogan air-drop, pray tell?" he remarked, fluttering his mandibles in amusement. "They're not, you know, krogan. They're quarians."

Kel coughed and murmured, "I think someone forgot his sense of humor back on the Anchrivos. Two someones, actually," ignoring the glare of death the remark received from both Thie and Axilus.

Raik grinned and shrugged. "I dunno, I think you're selling them short. Quarians are tougher than you think, Mads. Take Tiny over there, for example. Look at what he survived and tell me quarians are weak."

"Yeah, but he had actual biotics back then. Not the power of static electricity and wishful thinking."

"I'm no happier about it than you are, Ax." Thie crossed his arms. "Even less, really, but there's nothing we can do about that now. What we can do is figure out how we're going to hit this outpost without getting ourselves killed in the process." He studied the holographic map quietly for a moment, then sighed. "I don't know... Maybe we could try to set off a false alarm on the other end of the complex, give us some time to get in and bunker up before they figure out they were duped. If we set up properly, we might be able to whittle them down slowly, take them out in small groups instead of taking on the entire army at once."

"Do we know how many platforms they have?"

"No, just the number of active programs."

Kel bit his lip. "So they might have as many as fifty, or as few as ten, and we wouldn't know until it was too late to pull back out. I don't know, I don't like our odds..."

"We don't have a choice except to hit this ourselves. If we don't do it now, if we call for help and wait, they could pack up and leave before the proper strike force arrives." Thie shook his head. "We have guns, and we know how to use them, sort of. And we have military-grade shields, and medicine in case they fail. If we hit them hard and fast, don't give them a chance to regroup, we should be fine."

"Are you sure?" Kel looked up, sounding panicked. "But what if we-?"

"We'll be fine. Raik's coming with us, anyway. If anything goes wrong, he can help before anyone gets hurt. Right, Raik?"

Raik nodded and hefted his shotgun, grinning. "I'll blow those metal noodle-men to bits. Just like the old days."

Axilus twisted to stare at Raik. "What the fuck kind of "old days" are you dreaming up? The krogan weren't even _close_ to being involved in the geth revolt!"

"Nah. But I got to help clean up the mess on some of the colonies the quarians left behind."

 _"What_ colonies?"

"Exactly."

Axilus blinked several times, then groaned, shook his head, and turned back around. "I give up. You hear me? I give up. I give the fuck right up. I'm done. Have fun down there. Get shot in the face for me, you fucktard."

"Let's not encourage the messy near-deaths of any krogan onboard this vessel, Axilus." Thie rolled his eyes. "When krogan almost die, they tend to wreck shit up. It's in their nature."

"Yeah? Well, apparently so is a fuckin' shitty sense of humor. Asshole."

_"Enough."_

"Fuck all of you. Why did I even agree to this?"

"You didn't agree to it, you asked to come with us. Your decision, not ours."

"Oh, right. Well, what the _fuck_ was I _thinking?_ This is horrible. I've made a terrible mistake."

"Look, how about you stop your bitching and save it for after we leave?" Thie frowned in Axilus's general direction. "You can call your mother or something and bitch about us all you like, but wait until we don't have to listen to it."

"Good idea and all, but you're still gonna listen to it, cuz I'm not done telling you how much fuel we're wasting here!"

Kel sighed. "Enough about the fuel, please. We get it, you're angry about the fuel costs, but we just found a geth outpost, could you at least pretend you're not pissed off by our existence long enough to admit that this is a pretty big deal?"

Axilus snorted hard enough to make his nasal plates rattle and shook his head, but didn't reply.

Thie took that as a good sign and motioned to the other two quarians. "Are you both coming down with me and Raik?"

Siri nodded enthusiastically, but Kel paused, sounding conflicted. "Are you sure we'll be okay, even though we don't have combat training? I mean, these _are_ the things that forced our ancestors from the homeworld..."

"Kel." He flinched. "Don't worry. I won't let either of you get hurt, and neither will Raik. Right?" Raik huffed an affirmative, and Thie nodded in Kel's direction. "But I won't force you to come if you don't want to. It's your choice whether or not you want to risk your neck on a whim."

When he stopped talking, everything was silent for a long couple of minutes. Thie had begun to worry that maybe he'd said the wrong thing when Kel sighed and nodded, saying, "It'll be worth it. Whatever we can get."

"Right." Thie nodded back, then turned his attention to Siri. "Did you patch together that code yet?"

"What code?" Kel asked, suddenly confused, while Siri perked up.

"Yeah, I did, and I think it's working just fine, but we won't know until we stress-test it, right?" She tapped a few buttons on her omni-tool and a display appeared, filled with scrolling data points from top to bottom. "All we need is a synthetic target to test it on. I hope it works."

"It should. You're a very good programmer, Siri, give yourself more credit."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, what? Hello, there's at least one very confused quarian standing here, not knowing what you guys are talking about, what exactly am I missing here?"

Thie finally acknowledged Kel with a shrug. "Siri's been working on a cyberwarfare program to use on synthetics. If it works properly, it should override their friend-foe tags, which should turn them against their allies, at least for a few seconds. But it's an untested prototype. We don't exactly have synthetics to test it against _here,_ so I guess the drop to the geth base will be good for more reasons than one."

Kel blinked slowly. "You can't hack geth."

"Not for very long, no. They detect the abnormality and replace the infected code with a cached version in seconds. But, there you go. It takes a few seconds. So if we move quickly enough, this should give us at least _something_ to use against them, even if it is only a few seconds long." He shrugged. "A few seconds could be the difference between fighting one geth and six."

"Oh." He leaned back, contemplating for a moment, then shrugged. "Maybe. I guess we'll see, huh?"

"Right." Thie nodded towards the other three assembled around the galaxy map. "We'll drop in twenty. Do what you need to do, get your shit together, and meet me back here then for the descent." And with that, he turned on his heel and strode back towards the cockpit.

Axilus glanced up at him once he arrived, flaring his mandibles. "One of you is going to get hurt. Bad."

"We'll be fine, Axilus." Thie stared out the window, trying to ignore his own niggling doubts. "If you're so worried, though, why aren't you coming with?"

"Don't get me wrong, I'd _love_ to blow up some geth if they're actually there, especially after the stories you guys have told. But _someone's_ got to keep this girl in the air." Axilus cocked his mandibles in a small smile. "And if you need a hot extraction, well, you gotta have a pilot to fly the ship to you. Sad as it is, she doesn't fly herself. Or, well, not as well, at least. She can fly herself into the ground just fine, but I highly doubt that's what you'd want."

Thie paused, then shrugged. "I guess you're right. Too bad, we could use a strong biotic on the ground. Not a sad excuse for a biotic like me, at least with this shitty-ass implant."

"They're geth, Thie. More than likely, they're going to have shields, and guess what biotics don't work well against?"

"Well, good thing the three of us are armed with military-grade Overload programs."

The turian snorted and turned back to the forward console. "True enough, I guess." He was quiet for a minute, then quietly asked, "Are you sure you're ready for this so soon?"

Thie stiffened. "What are you talking about?"

"Are you going to be okay?" Axilus looked back up at him, subvocals fluttering with concern. "Is anything going to remind you of... back there? Anything that could potentially, you know, get you hurt if you freeze up for a minute? Maybe we should just call in a patrol instead of sending the four of you, just to be safe..."

It took a minute or two for Thie's breathing to return to normal, though his pulse showed no signs of slowing, and he had to work to loosen his jaw enough to speak. "I'll be fine. I have stims, they can help me forget if it gets too bad."

"Thie..."

"I said-" He broke off, closed his eyes, _breathed._ Then opened his eyes again. "I'll be fine. Don't worry."

Axilus forced a smile, though his uncertain subvocals betrayed his concern even to a race that couldn't truly hear them. "Too late."

He took a long minute to breathe, to force himself to calm down, and privately cursed his empty depressant stores. Painkillers just didn't have the same magic as mild sedatives when it came to relaxation. Dimly, he was aware of the other two quarians and one krogan now standing somewhere behind him, and registered, somewhere, that the twenty minutes he'd allotted them had passed. Too quickly, he thought, far too quickly. "Take us in."

"Aye, aye." Axilus's voice was tight as he keyed in the descent slope, easing the _Regalus_ down through Thaubos's almost-absent atmosphere and into the tiny clearing Siri had discovered, just barely out of range for geth sensors. As Thie turned to head for the cargo ramp, the turian snapped his hand out and caught his wrist, held him back for just a moment before reluctantly letting go. Even though Thie couldn't hear them properly, his subvocals still rang with concern. "Be careful."

Thie took a deep breath, tried to smile even though Axilus couldn't see it, and replied, with a shrug, "No promises."


	2. Suspiciously Specifically Denying Denying Something Suspiciously Specifically

The chill of the near-vacuum sliced through Thie's suit as if it weren't even there, sending shivers up and down his spine as he pressed his back against an iceberg of a rock face, peering around its edge at the desolate, decrepit wreck lying mere paces away. No geth had shown their faces, or, well, lack thereof, yet, even after they entered detection range, and there were no signs of them to be seen besides a lingering sense of wrongness that set each one of them on edge. Even Raik was tense, though the only outward expression of it was the slightest tension of his fingers around his gun, the anxious hovering of his finger above the trigger.

Thie tightened his grip on his shotgun, opening the private comm line they'd set up during downtime on the ship. However, he couldn't help keeping his voice low, paranoid of being heard. "Does anyone have a visual?"

Four meters to his right, Kel peeked out from cover for just a second before ducking back behind the rock face and whispering, "No, nothing. It's emptier than the colony was after-"

"Don't talk about that," Raik growled, his voice sounding oddly muffled from inside his helmet. "Last thing we need."

"Right." Thie took a slow, deep breath and edged out from behind cover, bringing his shotgun up to bear. From where he stood, he could see the main entrance, a small, damaged terminal flickering on and off just beside it. The door's lock predictably glowed bright red. "Siri, come on. I need you to hack."

Siri whimpered, but obeyed, hands and pistol shaking as she edged out after him. To her credit, she was doing much better now that she wasn't surrounded by angry apex predators, though putting her in a situation where she was probably surrounded by geth and had little protection certainly didn't help, so she was definitely entitled to a little bit of panic. At least she was still lucid.

Thie waved a hand to get her attention, sighing when she flinched. "Siri, listen. I need you to hack the lock. Get the door open so we can get inside and get bunkered up before the geth come back. Okay? Can you do that?"

"I- uh- I-" She hung her head, almost dropping her pistol before successfully managing to catch its mass effect field holster. "I can- sure, just, um, give me a minute..."

As she knelt, omni-tool casting brilliant orange shadows across the eerily quiet bunker, Thie turned and raised his shotgun, mirrored by Raik and, belatedly, Kel. No contacts so far, but that didn't mean anything with geth, who could download to mobile platforms and get moving so quickly, you'd never have a chance to notice them, let alone defend yourself. Especially in a situation like this, where the geth hadn't revealed their presence despite having most certainly noticed them, he needed to be on his guard.

The door creaked open and Thie slowly backed into the complex, finger still anxiously pressed against the shotgun's trigger. "No geth... this place is too quiet..." he murmured to himself before turning around. "Siri, don't go too far. Kel, watch the rear."

"Watching rear! Uh, okay. I can do that." Kel stumbled over his own feet, caught himself, then intently pointed his Tempest in the general direction of somewhere behind them, hands shaking. "Uh, yes. Nothing but a closed door. The door is still closed."

Thie sighed. "Kel, I know the door is there and closed. I'm not asking for live updates on the rear view, I'm asking you to keep an eye out for geth. Don't let them get the jump on us."

"Oh. Uh, right."

Raik snorted. "I don't like this."

"I don't either." Thie shifted his grip on his gun, sweeping it carefully over the shadowed corners of the room. "They should have detected us by now, headed us off. What are they waiting for?"

Several paces ahead of them, Siri gulped, tugged her gun from its energy sheath, and grasped it so tightly her hands tingled. There were only empty corridors ahead of them, vast expanses of darkness and silence broken only by the thin line of her flashlight and her own labored breathing, but something felt __wrong._ _ "I'm... going to take a look," she cautiously called back, receiving no response. Thie and Kel had found some geth terminal and had begun to puzzle over its patchy contents, while Raik had drifted to the side, staring at a dim display flickering strings of numbers.

Despite herself, she decided to go anyway, even though it meant she would go alone, because, she told herself, there were no geth, not in this particular building, at least. And so long as she could believe that, she would be safe.

Hopefully.

Taking a deep breath, she plunged into the darkness.

As she'd hoped, the bunker was, for the most part, abandoned. The only sounds echoing through the long, crumbling hallways were the gentle padding of her footsteps and her own quiet mumbling as she whispered basic mathematic equations to herself in an attempt to keep herself from panicking. Shining the thin point of her flashlight into each room revealed nothing but crawling cables, broken machinery, and the occasional deactivated geth platform, lying slumped against the wall or to the ground where it had fallen.

"It looks abandoned," she whispered to herself, eyes wide as she peered into another dark, empty room. Dust covered every surface. Computers and terminals looked like they hadn't seen power for years, decades, maybe longer. The platforms creaked painfully when she nudged them, dropped flakes of what would have been rust in an oxidized atmosphere. "Incredible..."

A thought occurred to her and she bit her lip, glancing back the way she came before stooping and wrapping her hands around the wrists of one of the abandoned platforms. Maybe she could take it back, bring it to the Fleet with her as her Pilgrimage gift. They didn't have much geth technology, and none of what little they __did_ _ have was modern, after all.

One heave and she immediately gave up. The geth platforms were much heavier than they looked, and she simply didn't have the muscle to even topple one over, let alone drag it out of the room. She sighed and wrung her hands, then knelt, prying at one of the panels on the prone mech's torso. "Maybe I can extract a memory core... or a primary processing unit, or __something_ _ of value..."

But, of course, the toll of time had rendered everything of even mild importance inside the unit useless, fine circuitry and delicate crystal lattice crumbling into little more than dust at a touch. After a moment or two, she surrendered, standing with a heavy sigh. So much for that idea.

She'd just begun contemplating whether or not removing the head analogue for further study aboard the __Regalus_ _ would be a worthy endeavor when the faintest echo of a sound caught her attention.

Her breath hitched in her throat, hands going to the pistol hanging at her side to flick the flashlight off and bring it to bear. Her visor's night vision mode was experimental code she hadn't quite finished tinkering with, but if there really were active geth inside the bunker, she much preferred having a chance to see them before they saw her. Even with her external speaker muted, she couldn't bring herself to speak, instead standing silent and frozen, eyes frantically flicking from corner to corner as the sound came again, louder.

__What is x if the square root of nineteen x over three equals six?_ _

Another sound, louder, echoed down the hallway, and she flinched, losing her place in the computations. Her pulse thrummed in her throat.

Three heartbeats later, she chose to run.

Two heartbeats after, she rounded the first corner and slammed face-first into something hard and cold which garbled surprise as she swung the pistol up and fired until the automatic vent kicked in, silencing the noise and splashing her with something cold as ice yet thin as water. Her heart raced, throat closing in panic as she sprinted down darkened halls, skidding around corners and bouncing off walls until she saw light.

Then she burst into the main chamber, black suit soaked head to toe with white conductive fluid, and screamed, "Geth!"

Everyone froze.

And then something struck her hard in the back.

The spots vanished from her vision in time for her to see Raik lunge past her, slamming into the geth which had wrapped its arms around her shoulders with the force of a nuclear explosion given krogan form. The geth was stubborn in its grasp and she yelped as it dragged her down with it, shrieking when the krogan tore the geth's arm away as though it were made of flesh rather than metal and tossed her aside. She scrambled out of the way as soon as she regained her wits, pressing her back against the wall and watching in horror as Raik lifted the geth by its thick throat and slammed it against the wall so hard the light serving as its 'eye' shorted out, then did so again and again until it had stopped moving before twirling around and flinging it at the floor like a biotiball champion.

Raik snarled at the crumpled pile of machinery that had once resembled a geth platform, then snorted and moved to help Siri to her feet. "You okay, kid?"

Siri's eyes were wide and her entire body shaking, however hard she tried to control it. "I-I- I'm- you- but- I- th-thank you-"

"Not what I asked." She flinched as he clasped both of her shoulders and leaned down to look her straight in the eye, repeating, "You okay?" and waiting for her to nod before letting go. Then he turned and scowled, barking, "What the fuck, you two?" to Thie, still standing frozen at the geth terminal Siri had left him with, and Kel, who had gotten halfway to the door before freezing like a statue. "Next time, try helping, you gutless chunks of pyjak ass!"

"That was a geth!" Kel exclaimed from his position near the main door, eyes wide as Pax. "A real, actual geth!"

Raik rolled his eyes. "No fuckin' shit. Tell you what, keep an eye out for my faith in those two worthless piles of varren shit that keep calling themselves quarians. I might have to put out a bounty to ever find it again."

Siri made a small noise at his elbow, and he turned to blink at her in time for her to raise a hand and whisper, "I think I'm going to stop standing up now," before crashing to the ground in a trembling heap of anxiety which he barely caught.

"Fuckin' lovely," he growled, carefully hefting the now-limp noodle of a quarian trying to slide to the floor up into his arms. "Either of you know how to give her a stim? Or a new spine? I think she lost hers when the geth rammed her. Think it stole it. Fuckin' thief. Someone search that pile of scrap for her spine before she melts."

A few minutes passed and neither standing quarian moved. Then Raik bared his teeth and snarled, "Now!" and both of them burst into motion.

Thie sidled up to Raik's side, calling up his omni-tool and keying in a hack to Siri's suit. A few strokes later and she jolted as though she'd been shocked before gasping and sitting bolt upright so quickly that Raik nearly dropped her. "Where did the geth go?! There was a geth! Where did it-" She froze once she caught sight of the heap of scrap metal and spilled conductive fluid that had once been a geth, then slowly turned her head to blink at Raik before shyly hiding her face. "I'm so sorry...!"

"Eh. Don't be." Raik shrugged. "Think you can stand?"

"What?"

"You fainted. Think you can stand now?"

"I..." She fidgeted, then nodded slowly. "Yes, I- I think so- oh, Keelah, I'm so sorry!"

"Relax. Take a deep breath." The krogan placed his hands on Siri's shoulders, ignoring that, being so small, she practically vanished beneath them. "Tell me what happened."

Siri took a few long, slow breaths, and slowly, the trembling in her hands lessened, though it didn't stop. "I was... I was looking around down the hall, trying to see if there was- if there was anything interesting, like a- like a geth terminal, or- or a server, or something, and I heard a- and I heard a noise, so I panicked and I ran and it was a geth and-"

"I said relax." Raik's grip on her shaking shoulders tightened, and slowly, she stilled again.

After taking another moment to collect herself, she began again. "It just... showed up, out of- out of nowhere from around a corner. I thought it might've been one of you, but none of you are made of metal or have flashlight heads, obviously..." She gave a nervous little laugh, then quickly sobered. "... if there's one geth, there's going to be more. Shouldn't we run?"

"It might have been the only one," Thie replied from across the room, where he'd hooked his omni-tool into the terminal he'd found before and begun to scan it. "There haven't been any alerts that I've noticed. It may have just been the one, or maybe we took it out before it could signal for help. We might be fine."

"But what if we're not?" Kel interrupted, hurrying to Siri's side. "Look, she's already shaken and that was just one geth! What if there's more? At least let her go back to the ship!"

"No, I'm fine!" Siri tried to protest, but the two boys had much more volume than the shy little girl and quickly drowned her out.

Thie scowled in Kel's direction, and Kel bristled. "She's not a doll, Kel. She'll be fine."

"And what if she's not? Keelah, Thie, she isn't a combatant!"

"Neither are we, but you aren't bitching about that, are you?"

"Well, no-"

"Stop freaking out about Siri. She's the one that wanted to go on this little excursion, I think she'll survive." Thie shook his head. "And besides, if she wants to leave, she can. But guess what? There's a krogan right there who already destroyed one geth with his bare hands, do you really think he's going to let anything so much as breathe on her, let alone hurt her?"

"But-"

Siri struggled to raise her voice. "I said I'm fine! Stop arguing, we need to move!"

When neither quarian registered that he'd heard her, Raik puffed up like a hanar who'd just heard someone graphically insult the Enkindlers and bellowed, "QUIET!" so loudly that Siri's speakers stopped working for a moment. When they finally came back online, the room had fallen completely silent.

After a moment, Thie coughed awkwardly and Kel lowered his head and mumbled, "Sorry."

Raik snorted. "Listen to your girlfriend, Raanis. Let her make her own decisions."

Five minutes later, after Siri and Kel had finished frantically trying to explain that no, it wasn't like that, Thie cut them off with a sigh. "Look, we probably don't have that much time to finish what we came here to do. There's bound to be a server around here somewhere, and we need to find it. Siri?"

Siri shook her head to clear away the blush and nodded. "Right, okay, I'll see if I can find a signal," she said as she quickly reversed into a corner, proceeding to curl up into a small ball with her omni-tool.

"What should I do?" Kel asked after a moment, fidgeting slightly. He was still blushing, Thie noted with amusement. It was obvious even through his mask.

After a moment, he shrugged. "Watch the doors, I suppose. Make sure no other unwanted surprises pop in on us. We can't do much until Siri finds the server- _i_ __f_ _ she finds the server."

"She will. She's good at stuff like that." Kel grinned, then drew the SMG from his hip and moved to look nervously down the dark corridor. Something about dark abandoned ruins just made everyone nervous, and Thie didn't envy that Kel was the one who had to stand in front of the dark, foreboding hallway, hoping nothing came out of it. At least the geth would give themselves away with their flashlight heads, so there was that. "But, um, Siri, if you could, please do try to make it quick."

And she did. Minutes later, she popped up from where she'd curled up on the floor with a triumphant "Aha!" before rushing over to Thie and pulling up a diagram of the complex. "Look, right there!"

Thie blinked and peered at the display. "Where?"

"There!" She pointed towards the center of the compound. "The signals are all originating from that area. That must be the server!"

He stared at the diagram for a moment, then gave Siri an incredulous look. "That's halfway across the compound. We're bound to run into more geth."

"I- I know, but-"

"And you couldn't even handle the one. Are you sure you should be doing this, Siri'Yanna?"

She paused, then nodded sharply despite the slight quaver in her voice as she replied, "Yes. I can do it. I'll be fine."

“If you're certain.” He glanced back at Kel, letting his voice take on an ever-so-slight teasing tone. “I mean, you wouldn't want to worry him, would you?”

It had the desired effect. Siri flushed beneath her visor, so brightly that Thie could make out the faint outline of her cheekbones through the polarized glass and the darkness, and pushed him. “Stop doing that!”

He let himself laugh, though he was careful to keep it quiet. Didn't need to let anyone else in on the teasing, after all. Especially Kel. Or Raik. Raik seemed to be particularly protective of Siri recently. The less he prodded the sleeping maw, the better. “Doing what? I'm just stating facts.”

“We're not dating!”

“Not _yet_.”

Siri flushed again, brighter, and Thie noted with satisfaction that she didn't refute him. His curiosity fulfilled, he let the subject drop, certainly to Siri's relief, and returned to the matter at hand. “Can you find us a shortcut to the server?”

She gave him a bewildered look. “A shortcut? This is a bunker!”

“I realize that. However, it was also STG, and what's their reputation?”

After some brief contemplation, she acquiesced and began studying the projected floor plan in silence for a few moments before pointing at some tiny detail. “What about here?”

Thie leaned in, squinting at the junction she indicated. A small false wall hidden behind what looked to be a pile of meaningless junk, connected to a series of small tunnels branching across the entire complex. “Perfect. The only problem is...”

“... we don't have the full map, I know.” Siri closed the diagram and shrugged. “I think it must be something about this moon's ground composition. It's mostly metals, so maybe that interfered with the scanning process. I don't know. But it's our best chance, unless, I mean, you _want_ to launch a ground assault. Which would be suicide, might I add.” She bit back a nervous little laugh, twisting her hands together nervously. “So, um, do you prefer getting lost or pulling a, oh, what's the human term... a Lee-boy Jenkies, I think it was?”

“Leeroy Jenkins,” Thie corrected after a moment of helplessly searching the extranet for whatever reference that was supposed to be, “and no, we're not pulling a full-frontal assault, that would be a move more worthy of the Madelivio mantle. The tunnels look like our best bet.”

“I don't think Kel's going to like that.”

“You're worried about Kel?” Thie snorted. ”Imagine how Raik's going to feel, those tunnels look like they're barely big enough to hold him.” The image of a huge krogan battlemaster angrily squirming his way through a tunnel built for a salarian less than a third of his size like an infant thresher maw with a bad temper flashed across his mind and he had to mute his external speaker so his laughter didn't attract attention.

Siri blinked at him, looked down, then shook her head. “So, um, do you want me to go find the entryway? And you can tell the other two what's going on?”

He reined himself in and nodded. “Right, yes, do that. Uh, wait, on second thought,” she paused, halfway to the hallway where Kel stood, “maybe I should go find it, in case there's another geth waiting to mug whoever goes down the hallway.”

She blinked at him again. “Or maybe we should just take Kel and Raik with us and explain on the way.”

“Oh.” Wow, he felt stupid all of a sudden. Why hadn't he thought of that? ”Yeah. Or that. Uh, I'll tell them.”

“Right.”

* * *

“This is not a tunnel.”

Thie flinched, trying to ignore the rather uncomfortable sensation of eyes burning into the back of his head as they stared blankly at the tiny opening to a similarly-tiny vent shaft that was to be their shortcut. “It... didn't look that small on the projections,” he lamely responded.

Raik snorted. “You really expect me to fit inside of that? In case you somehow haven't noticed, _I'm very large_. I don't think I could even fit in one asscheek!”

“I could probably fit,” Kel suggested from his position at Siri's side, a position which he quickly vacated once Raik turned his glare of doom from Thie to him and sent him scurrying for cover.

“Maybe you could stay outside as a guard?” Siri suggested, and Thie noted with mild envy that Raik didn't turn the glare on her in turn. There was no reason for a krogan to be so fond of a quarian. It didn't matter _how_ shy they were. “I mean, what if the geth come in after us? It's too small a space for us to use our guns.” She glanced down at her hip, where her pistol rested, then quickly added, “Or, it would be, if we actually knew how to _use_ them.”

Raik grumbled deep in his chest, a deep, bone-chilling almost-snarl which set the hair on the back of Thie's neck on end. Then he huffed petulantly. “Fine. I'll stay here and keep your sorry asses from getting swarmed by the stupidest geth this side of the Veil.”

Siri perked up and gave a little noise Thie could only describe as a cheerful, very girlish squeal. “Thank you, Raik! We'll make it fast, I promise.”

“You'd better.” Raik leaned against the thick bunker wall with a reverberating thud, arms crossed in a definitely-grouchy manner. He tossed his head once at Siri, then scowled in Thie and Kel's general direction. “Make it snappy, you two. I don't pride myself on patience. Or miraculously storming an entire base full of synthetic scrap heaps just to rescue a bunch of morons who got in over their heads.” He cast a glance at Siri, then quickly added, “And dragged a poor innocent girl to her near-doom.”

Favoritism, much? Thie thought to himself with a frown, standing as high as he could on his toes to peer at the grated vent. It was a very old mechanism; rather than being sealed to the wall with high-powered electromagnets, the cover used a rather primitive means of thin, fragile metal screws to mount itself. He found himself questioning their earlier decision that the place was an STG base almost immediately; the STG was far too advanced to use such primitive measures for _anything_ . The base had to be _old_. “If you give me a minute, I think I can break these screws and get the cover off.”

“Screws?” Siri bounced on her toes, trying to get a decent glance at the mechanism despite being far too short to have even the slightest chance of success. “You mean actual _screws_?”

Kel blinked in bewilderment. “Is this place really that old?”

“It must be.” Thie finally managed to call up the proper tool from his omni-tool, a thin, flat holographic blade about as long and wide as one of his fingers, and worked to pry it under the cover's edge. “I've never seen something so primitive before.” After a moment's pause, he amended, “Well, maybe once.”

“Where?”

“A pilgrim came to the _Olyna_ with this human ship, the _Wing of the Patriot_ or something stupid like that. Dated back to maybe a year before the 314.” Thie grimaced when the omni-blade made an ear-piercing screeching noise as it scratched against the metal and turned down his external audio input. “One of my mom's friends, this old woman probably six times my age, she was one of the engineers tasked with bringing the thing up to snuff with the rest of the fleet.”

Siri shook her head. “Sounds like a nightmare.”

“It was. Thing had the worst drive core I'd ever seen, even compared to the _Meridian_ .” Kel snorted in disbelief and Thie cast him an over-the-shoulder grin. “No, really. The humans were fucking _terrible_ at building drive cores. Pretty sure they still are. But anyway, so, we go onboard, right, and we're expecting tech pretty similar to every other race's.”

“But?”

“But, this thing was built so bad, I don't know how it made it out of orbit, let alone to the Leyya system. Shoddy sheet metal bulkheads held together with screws and these really shitty rivets, computers with more wires than a geth stripped of its omni-synthetic casing, you name it.” He gave a short laugh. “I was never comfortable on it. Thing ended up shaking itself apart during a relay jump. Killed about twenty people, spaced six.”

Siri's eyes went wide behind her mask, as did Kel's. Raik simply raised a brow ridge. “Were they recovered?”

Thie lifted one shoulder in a shrug and replied simply, “Two were.”

Raik's eyes bugged. “You're telling me you guys just let four quarians get lost in space? What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

“They were lost during a relay jump.” Thie shrugged again. “For all we know, half of them ended up somewhere in the first system, one got flung into a connecting system, and the other two miraculously found themselves in the system we were landing in. All I know is, only two of them were ever found. They weren't doing so well last I checked.”

Kel shook his head slowly. “Uh... how long ago was this?”

“About...” Thie lowered his hands long enough to count on his fingers, then finished, “five years ago. Why?”

He was quiet for a moment. “... I think one of my dad's friends might've been there.”

Thie paused. “... oh. Uh. Sorry for your loss?”

“He was a dick anyway.” Kel lifted his shoulders in a mild shrug. “Dad was more relieved he was gone than he was upset. Said the idiot was trying to run for admiral so he could try to talk them into going back to war with the geth.”

From somewhere behind Kel, Siri sighed and shook her head. “Why are all the admiralty candidates suicidal?”

“Tell me about it. And man, _that_ guy? He was _crazy_ about it. Even worse than Admirals Gerrel and Zorah, and that oughta say something. I think he might've been a little...” He twirled his index finger around beside his helmet with a short laugh.

Thie blinked at him once or twice, then slowly shook his head before returning to the work at hand. “You have the strangest ability to be unnaturally peppy at the most unfitting times.”

“I do my best.” Kel beamed, then jumped half out of his suit when, without warning, the vent cover made a horrendous screeching noise and rained rust and an army of dust bunnies down on top of Thie before abruptly coming loose, nearly clocking him upside the head before he somehow managed to, in his shock, grab either side of it and stopped it an inch from the glass of his visor. He stared at it with wide eyes for a moment, then, with Kel's help, quietly lowered it to the ground, letting it go with a low, much more manageable _thud_.

Raik, from somewhere in the hallway behind them, snorted. “I didn't know quarian engineers came with a built-in alarm system. Learn something new every day.”

Thie shook his head, more to dislodge the thick coating of what felt like a century or two of dust from his visor and suit. Siri giggled as she and Kel both stepped away, trying to look like they were doing anything but fleeing the downpour, and Thie huffed, giving them both the stink eye. “You two are going in before me.”

“Why?” Kel stifled a giggle. “Not like you can get much dirtier.”

“You know what?” Thie's voice cracked and Siri clapped a hand over her speaker in an incredibly pointless attempt to hide her frantic giggling. Beneath his mask, his eye twitched. “Fuck you. You're going in first."

 


	3. First of All, How Dare You

The duct, to Siri’s eternal surprise, was bigger than the opening would have led them to believe, widening out into a yawning tunnel that, while still not nearly big enough for a krogan, was just the right size for three quarians to crawl through relatively comfortably. Kel, astute as ever, asked, “What did they build these so big for? It’s like they _wanted_ us to climb through or something.”

Somewhere behind Siri, Thie said, “They’re _salarians_. Espionage is their _thing_. There’s probably millions of secret passageways per _building_ on Sur’Kesh.” Siri could practically hear him rolling his eyes.

Kel huffed. “But why the _air ducts_?”

“Think like a salarian, Kel,” Siri offered. “Why _not_?”

“Because it’s weird?”

“That sounds like a pretty salarian reason to do it.”

“Well, I still think-“

“Are you two going to argue salarian reasoning all day, which is the most futile thing I’ve ever heard of, because I swear even _they_ don’t know their own stupid reasons for anything, or are we going to go find the stupid server?” Thie interrupted. “I swear, you’re worse than Axilus and his brother, and they argued over who let their mother’s tea cool!”

Siri and Kel were quiet for a moment, then Kel ventured, “So who let the tea cool?”

Thie groaned. “Does it matter?”

“Well, you mentioned it…”

“It was the major. He had to take a call and forgot to say the tea was done. Now _shut up_!”

They fell silent again. Siri had quietly hoped for a little more of a chance to discuss salarians and their odd habits with Kel some more, but she supposed Thie did have a point. There was no telling what kind of security measures the geth would have in place. As fun of a conversation as it was, Siri didn’t feel like getting shot because of it.

After that, it was a long, slow crawl to the main server, riddled with pauses at every intersection to check the woefully incomplete map. If the measly views they could get as they passed by grates were anything to go by, the geth had barely sent anything to the moon, but it was still more than they could reasonably take out on their own. Siri found herself holding her breath every time they passed by even a still, apparently empty platform. She didn’t know why- it wasn’t like they’d be able to hear her. She wasn’t a volus. It was just the principle of the thing.

They found the main server in a large, wide-open room that vaguely reminded Siri of the cafeteria at the TEC headquarters in Cipritine. She’d rarely gone there herself, since she couldn’t very well eat the food, but she’d occasionally tagged along with Sephira, who had a tendency to take her work with her wherever she went so she could obsess over it no matter where she was. All this room was missing was roughly a bajillion tables and chairs, and it would be a salarian version of the TEC cafeteria.

Of course, it was also missing hordes of hungry turians.

Siri shuddered. Probably best that it stay abandoned.

The vent came out near the floor, lending further credence to their earlier theory that the salarians had designed it with fast travel specifically in mind. The grate, like the first, was held on with screws. Luckily, it was much easier to break them from this side, and it popped off after one, two, three solid kicks that all three quarians took a moment to gripe about leaving the grate’s imprint on the bottoms of their feet before crawling out and standing up at the edge of the room.

Kel was once again set to guard the exit route while Thie and Siri approached the big, humming… thing in the center of the room. It was big and bulky, and distinctively geth-y. It had three terminals spaced evenly around it, where Siri supposed mobile platforms would network with it if they were around.

“This is creepy,” Thie finally said, after a moment of inspecting the server. “Where are all the geth?”

“Inside the server, I suppose,” Siri said with a shrug, pulling up her omni-tool. “Hold on, let me see what I can get from this.”

Thie grumbled. “I’m just saying, there’s something weird about this. There should be platforms around here somewhere. Why would they just leave it unguarded?”

"Well, we _are_ in an isolated area…”

“So is Rannoch, Siri.”

“Maybe they heard Axilus complaining about fuel prices and went to see what was up,” Kel joked from his post by the vent. “I’ll bet he’s still moaning about it.” He chuckled. “Or just moaning.”

“Thank you, Kel, for that mental image that I really didn’t need. Or want. At all.”

“Any time!” Kel chirped. Siri wondered if maybe he’d spent too much time absorbing the turian sense of humor.

Siri sighed and went back to her omni-tool display. _Boys_. At least the turians had an _excuse,_ what with both Madelivio brothers apparently having girlfriends…

They worked in relative silence for a few more minutes, Thie walking circles around the server while Siri frowned at the holo display hovering over her wrist. The security measures didn’t seem _too_ tight, just a minor alert program she had to work fast to deactivate and a rewrite module that seemed designed specifically to make her life more difficult than it had to be. Which was the entire point of a security program, she supposed.

The rewrite module had no discernible pattern to when it would start rewriting the coding, so it took her longer than she would have liked to get anywhere. Keelah, geth programming was more of a monster than a grouchy turian officer awake long after he should have gone to sleep. She was getting there, but she was going to need a long rest after this.

She was just peeling back the last layer of security over one set of data when Kel made a strangled noise.

She spun around to see Kel shakily pointing his gun at three geth rounding the corner. Somewhere to her left, Thie yelped, “Geth!” Because if there was one thing he was good at, it was stating the obvious.

Siri stared, frozen with her eyes wide, until Kel made another attempt at a shout, spurring her to admittedly sluggish and shaky action. She fumbled for her omni-tool, bringing up the combat suite and starting to hunt for her experimental program. Come on, come on…

The program loaded after a few long seconds, and she hurriedly activated it, flinging her arm out in the general direction of the approaching geth and hoping beyond hope it worked. Just a few seconds, that’s all, please, just a few seconds…

Some ancestor must have taken pity on her, because the geth stuttered, then stopped, making… well, geth noises as they paused in their approach. Thie wasted no time in firing, the sharp bark of the shotgun ringing around the empty room even well after the platforms had fallen to pieces. Then the shotgun blasts were replaced with Thie cursing as his gun started to overheat, then a rather uncomfortable silence.

Siri stared at the remains of the geth, shaking. It worked. It actually worked. Of course, Thie had destroyed the test before they could see how long it would last, and the geth would probably figure out how to counteract it fairly quickly, but it worked.

Over by the vent, Kel cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, his voice just a little bit higher than usual, “I think we should grab what we can and get back to the ship before anything more exciting shows up, how about you guys?"

* * *

 

After the chaos on the base, it was almost jarring to come back to the relative peace and quiet of the ship.

“Relative” being the key term, of course.

“… So I’m like, ‘Dude, I’m not fucking interested, and even if I was, I have a fucking boyfriend.’” A vaguely familiar voice drifted over from the cockpit, feminine and dual-toned. Siri glanced at the others, who only shrugged at her. Big help. She shook her head at them and started making her way up to the cockpit to see what was going on, trying very hard not to move so much that the synthetic fluid still covering her suit would drip. Who knew if this stuff would stain metal?

In the cockpit, Axilus had his back to them, feet propped up on the dash and one hand loosely clutching a bottle of some reddish liquid. Taking up maybe a quarter of the display above the dash was a vidcomm screen, mostly filled with a very pretty turian woman with lilac facepaint that Siri dimly recognized from Axilus’ birthday party. What was her name again? Freesia, Falya… No, Freiya, that was it. The friend Axilus had disappeared with after they’d gone home from the combat arena. She was in the middle of narrating some story, moving her hands within the limited frame to further illustrate her point as she went on, “But then _he_ was all like, ‘Oh it’s okay, baby, he won’t mind,’ and _I_ was like, ‘Yes he fucking will, we agreed to _tell_ each other before we had any flings.’ But this fucker _still_ wouldn’t leave me be, going on about how you wouldn’t have to find out, and it could be our little secret, and all that bullshit, so I pulled back and _slugged_ ‘im, hard as I could, yeah? And, shit, _culim_ , you shoulda seen it, he went _flying_ , it was _awesome_.”

Axilus cackled and took a drink from the bottle in his hand. “Wish I could’ve seen his face. You always did have the nastiest punch our side of the Aralakh relay.”

Freiya snickered. “I got pictures. I’ll send them to you in a bit, you’ve got company.”

“Huh?” Axilus’ feet disappeared as he sat up, then reappeared as he spun his chair around to see who it was. His gaze flicked over each member of the party, once, twice, three times, then settled squarely on Siri. He was quiet for a second, then swiveled his head to look back at Freiya. “Are you seeing this?”

Freiya’s mandibles fluttered. “Sure am.”

The two turians were silent a moment longer, looking at each other, then burst out laughing.

All three quarians jumped, and Raik snorted quietly. “What?” Siri asked. “What is it?”

Axilus spoke first, managing to choke back his laughter long enough to say, “You look like you just got back from cleaning up after a frat party!”

This sent the turians into even wilder hysterics, while Siri just blinked. “Am… Am I missing something?”

The laughter cut off abruptly, and Axilus turned back to the screen to confer with Freiya. After maybe half a minute of fervent whispering, Axilus turned back, shrugged, and said simply, “No.”

Siri started to speak, but Kel jumped in first. “What do you mean, no?” he demanded. “You can’t just laugh at her like that and not explain!”

Siri reached out in Kel’s direction, stopping just short of putting a hand on his arm. Best not to spread the synthetic fluid. “Kel, really, it’s okay,” she said. “It’s probably just some turian cultural thing. It’s no big deal. I’m just going to go clean this stuff off. I think it’s starting to get crusty.”

Freiya let out a snort. “Oh, that brings back memories. Good times.”

Axilus snickered. “Oh good, that makes two of us who remember that night well.”

Siri huffed and spun around, determined to leave before they made any other dumb jokes that she didn’t understand. Luckily, nobody stopped her, and she made her way to the kitchen unimpeded.

She was just starting to run a dry cloth over her suit to pick up any remaining moisture when she heard footsteps behind her and a little cough. She glanced over her shoulder, then finished drying herself off and tossed the cloth on the counter before turning to face Kel and Thie, who had come up behind her. “Do you need something?”

Thie elbowed Kel, who glared at him and rubbed his arm for a moment before turning back to Siri and fidgeting. “Well, um, you know the data you recovered from the server?”

A knot formed in Siri’s stomach. “What about it?”

“Well, we’ve been talking, and, well, we think you should be the one to take it back to the Fleet.”

Siri paused and blinked at him, then tilted her head. Wait, that was a turian mannerism. Dammit. “Why?”

Thie folded his arms behind his back and stood with his back straight, almost eerily reminiscent of Axilus. “It’s only fair. You were the one who found the server and got us there, and you’re the one who got the data in the first place. It’s your data. All we did was shoot things.”

Siri blinked, then stammered, “But- but I couldn’t have done it without help! If it weren’t for you two, I’d still be on Palaven, helping Axilus’ mother with computer simulations.”

“So?” Kel butted in. “You still did all the work, Siri. Just take the data. You deserve it.”

Siri hesitated. She could go back to the Fleet, join a new ship… “But what about you?”

“We’ll figure something out,” Thie said with a shrug. “We always do.”

“I…” Siri paused once more, then sighed and nodded. “Alright. I can call my father, ask him the Fleet’s current location.”

Thie nodded. “Axilus said we’ll be headed to Triginta Petra once we get out of this system. It’s a turian colony with shuttle routes to major hub worlds. You should be able to make your way back to the Fleet from there.”

Siri swallowed. “Right, sure, I think I can do that.”

Thie nodded. “Go call your father. I think Axilus said we still have half an hour to the relay, and then it’s another three to Triginta Petra.”

With that, he left, dragging Kel along with him and apparently ignoring the looks Kel was throwing over his shoulder at Siri.

Siri stood stock-still for a moment, watching her hands. Then she took a deep breath and headed to the terminal set up on one side of the mess hall.

It took three tries to connect to the Idenna. The first, the signal was dropped halfway through the “calling” screen wait-time. The second, she got a busy signal. Then, on the third, the screen went dark for a moment, then showed her a quarian man shifting in his seat. “ _Piita’ma_?”

“Siri?” Her father’s eyes widened behind his mask. “Oh, _keelah_ , _kurid’hi_ , it’s so good to see you. Is everything okay?”

“I’m fine, _piita’ma_. Actually, I wanted to ask, do you have the Fleet’s current location?”

“I have the coordinates, yes. Why do you ask?”

Siri fidgeted. “Well, you see, I’m about ready to complete my Pilgrimage. All I need is a way back.”

Her father was silent for a heartbeat. “You- you what?”

“I’ve got some data on the geth. I need to find a way back to the Flotilla. We’ll be at Triginta Petra soon, so I figure-“

“Wait, wait. Why are you going to Triginta Petra?”

Siri hesitated, then sighed. “Maybe I should start from the beginning…”

So she told him everything, starting with her crash-landing on Palaven. To his credit, her father stayed silent, though from the way he kept fidgeting and tensing, she was pretty sure he was just barely refraining from outbursts. He listened quietly all the way through to the end, which she finished off with Axilus and Freiya’s teasing and Kel and Thie’s decision to let her take all the data. Then, after she’d sat back and gave a half-hearted little shrug, he leaned forward, steepled his fingers, and said in the most serious tone of voice she’d ever heard him use, “Siri’Yanna, I want names.”

She yelped. “ _Piita’ma_! They’re _teenagers_! And my friends!”

“That’s not an excuse for making sexual jokes about you!”

“Sexual- _Piita’ma_ , there was no harm in it! It was just innuendo, and half of it was an in-joke between them!”

“That’s beside the point, Siri’Yanna!” Her father scowled so ferociously she could tell it was there even with his mask, then sighed. “We can talk about this later. I’ll forward you the current coordinates. _Keelah_ , I’m so proud of you, Siri. Good luck. _Keelah se’lai_.”

“ _Keelah se’lai, piita’ma_. I’ll be back soon.”


End file.
